When I returned to Sheffield after completing my postgraduate degree in 2017, I found myself suspended in a quiet limbo. The absence of connections and an art school network left me feeling adrift. Despite the city’s vibrant arts ecology, the contemporary art world felt distant, like something unfolding in a place I couldn’t quite reach. Bloc Projects provided a much-needed passage into that place. One autumn evening, I attended their Test Bed #1 exhibition opening, showcasing new work by Sheffield artist Lucy Vann. I was welcomed by the team with such warmth that I left feeling immediately more connected. Their generosity had lit up a space in the city for me, and from there, a constellation slowly began to form.
It is from this ongoing generosity and warmth that Bloc Projects has established their new artist development programme Pathways. Initiated by team members Sunshine Wong and Thomas Griffiths, the programme responds to a need for more support for Sheffield artists immediately after graduation, during that critical and frightening time when access to a studio, facilities, peer and institutional support falls sharply away.
This first year of Pathways will offer four invited fine art graduates – Mia Colman, Jim Ever, Jack Mackness and Ava Ord – a two-week residency at Bloc Projects, followed by a four-week public exhibition. In discussing the selection process, Griffiths emphasised that as well as seeing overlaps within the artists’ individual practices, they also noted the fact that the group had all shown an interest in collaborative practice during their studies and were already actively engaged in Sheffield’s arts ecology. ‘I felt it was important to support artists with a commitment to collective working and community-building.’
The programme will provide space, peer support and professional mentoring, alongside a £1,000 fee and a materials budget. Led by Griffiths, an artist and co-director of local cooperative-run gallery GLOAM, Pathways has been shaped by their experience as a fine art graduate in the city. A key ethos of the programme is a refusal to reduce emerging artists solely to their potential to be future professionals, resisting the ever-crushing pressure to fit art into utilitarian frameworks. Instead, it will take a more holistic and critical approach, proposing a horizontal and collaborative platform that acknowledges precarity as the defining condition of being a contemporary practitioner. Artist and producer Amelia Hawk is working with Thomas to embed care within the programme’s structure and will lead a wellbeing workshop. ‘We will be focusing on how to embed care for yourself within your practice, thinking about the artist and practice as one interconnected entity,’ Hawk explains. ‘So often we show our work, we perform, install, create – we act out the role of the artist without considering our needs. My approach to working with the group is to think of our full selves and the needs we have as human people, who are not detached from the art and its making but are intrinsically a part of it.’
In 2016, Griffiths was the recipient of bursaries from Bloc Projects and S1 Artspace, both of which served as critical stepping stones for developing their career in art. Griffiths recalls the anxiety of navigating these early experiences, though. ‘During my first opening, I was like, AHHH! It was really scary. I remember going into the toilet and ringing someone. It took years for me to get comfortable, to learn to mingle and go to openings.’ Their wish for Pathways is to offer a helping hand to those just starting out, and the group have already been taken on a tour of cultural spaces across the city, with talks by curators and artists organised at each location. The programme will extend beyond Sheffield, embedding the group in a broader cultural landscape through visits to Coventry Biennale and neighbouring cities. ‘Inviting them in so they can connect with people was really important. It’s all things that I’ve struggled to navigate on my own in the past. Hopefully programmes like this provide that opportunity, so that someone’s not deterred from reaching their potential.’
Speaking with the four artists across December 2025 and January 2026, I was struck by their shared desire to commune with the landscape and non-human world through their practices, a response to the social and ecological urgencies of this era. Throughout our conversations, the land emerged as a powerful presence, a mode of making that feels particular to the city. The nearby Peak District, with its wind-softened rock edges, heather and wheeling skies, with deep ties to struggles around fair access to nature, is sensed throughout the city, in studios as much as in recent urban design. Walking through Sheffield, the smell of the wind reminds you that the moors are just beyond the buildings.
Currently without a studio, Mia Colman often works on sunny benches, in pubs, or at her living-room table. As a result, the work she’s made since graduating is shrinking in scale. The Pathways residency will offer a chance to go big again.
Having grown up rurally, too much time away from the natural world leaves her feeling off-kilter. Her practice seeks to reconcile this disconnect, challenging the extractive logic that has sought to distance us from the ecosystem we are part of. The animal is a recurring figure in her work; working primarily with found textiles, she makes banners and cross-stitched works that challenge anthropocentric, reductive assumptions about animals’ capacity for love, empathy and culture.
‘There’s a kind of falseness in people’s relationships to animals,’ Colman says. ‘We’re at a point where we’re so far removed that they have become metaphors, images that stand in for a real relationship.’ One humorous cross stitch piece titled ‘Do earwigs really go in your ears? And other things you should know’ (2025) depicts an earwig cradling her eggs with her body next to the word MOTHER in block capitals, insect and text superimposed over a found embroidery of a sweet, thatched cottage brimming with candy-coloured flowers. It is simultaneously an eff you to cutesy, reductive notions of motherhood and an affirmation of the multiplicity of maternal experiences. ‘Earwigs are the most devoted mother out of any invertebrate,’ Colman explains. ‘When their eggs hatch, the babies stay with mum for up to six weeks to learn from her, which is really sweet.’
Concerned with the politics of labour under capitalism and patriarchy, she sees her adoption of slow textile processes as a quiet act of resistance against the encroachment of mass production. Interested in the cultural resonance of objects, she doesn’t attempt to hide the past uses of a found material. ‘Super Love Buggy and Friends’ (2025) comprises three large standing panels that celebrate creatures often labelled as ‘vermin’, including rats, pythons, badgers, worms and bugs. Hand-sewn from gaudy floral textiles sourced from a local fabric shop that diverts scraps from the landfill, the work recalls handcrafted trade union banners, extending a message of solidarity towards the non-human world. ‘The fact that I am a working-class woman and an artist and maker, these kinds of things are important for me to take ownership of. I think craft can be a really liberating thing. To take the means of production into your own hands, to make what you need – I’ve always thought of that as a powerful act. Using these techniques puts me in a line of skilled female labour that I’m proud to be part of and to be making a new path from.’
When I spoke to Jim Ever, he was preparing for a two-week-long Yorkshire Graduate Award residency at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, centred on an ancient ash tree planted in the eighteenth century. ‘It feels like a powerful figure in the landscape, thinking about everything it has witnessed and how much the world has changed in its lifetime. Working there in January felt important. The tree is bare and its age is more visible: it’s in a moment of transition.’ Ever’s plans are to create a sound piece that will capture field recordings from around the site and experiment with in-situ projection and moving image. He will return to exhibit the body of work in August, when the tree is in its summer state, sap high in leafy branches.
Ever’s early memories of visiting the park during school trips, where he encountered works by Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth embedded in the landscape, were formative moments for him. His practice often explores the meeting of natural and synthetic environments: ‘Concrete, metal, construction alongside countryside elements like rocks, sky and plants. Living in a city like Sheffield has really shaped that. I often feel positioned in between these two worlds, and that tension has a strong presence in my work.’
His practice is multidisciplinary, moving between photography, sound, moving image, collage and installation, often drawing on memory and personal history. Ever’s BA exhibition Help Needed to Redo Time (to Morning) responded to his grandmother’s experience of Alzheimer’s. Using tape loops, field recordings and an upright piano soundboard, the installation explored sound’s capacity to evoke memory non-linearly. ‘For that piece, it grew quite naturally from something quite small. I made a series of six images I’d taken when I was clearing my grandma’s house out. And I thought, what if I carried on with this? Most of my ideas for bigger projects start with something very little. I’ll start something and then a few months will pass and I’ll revisit it.’
He was introduced to photography at school, and he has been using the medium more frequently since graduating, partly due to its DIY potential having lost access to the university’s workshops. He uses photography as a form of durational documentation, revisiting the same sites over multiple years. ‘Spurn Point Archive’ (ongoing, mid 2010s to present) is a series of faded and layered polaroids depicting Spurn Point, a spit of land jutting into the North Sea on the East Yorkshire coast. The sun-bleached quality of the images evokes the erosion of land by waves and salt air over millennia, his project a passing moment in its vast temporal span.
After completing an undergraduate degree at Chelsea College of Arts, Jack Mackness stepped away from artistic practice for seven years, immersing himself in a spiritual journey through Buddhism. Drawn to the Peak District, Mackness later relocated to Sheffield, a move which rekindled his arts practice. He ended up pursuing an MFA at Sheffield Hallam, and today the threads that led him here remain central to his practice. His work considers ‘thin places’, landscapes where the lines between physical and spiritual are porous.
In 2025, Mackness began a series of performances titled ‘Journey 1’, ‘Journey 2’ and ‘Journey 3’, unfolding on the plateau known as the Woolpacks on Kinder Scout, scattered with wind-sculpted boulders of 320-million-year-old gritstone. ‘There’s this one boulder that I really love, and I’ve been making textiles as a sort of gesture of care, draping them over it. I feel like there’s a real maternal warmth coming from this boulder, and when I discovered it, I didn’t know what else to do other than to cover it. It’s been a really healing process for my own grief.’
Mackness undertook journeys one and three alone but performed the middle journey as part of a collective. Friends and family ascended the winding path to the boulder, where they shared food prepared by Mackness. Documented through photographs and a poem titled ‘Lentils’, the performance frames collective making and witnessing as sacred acts for healing: ‘We walked with the sky in our mouths / wrapped in threads drawn from our own hands / woven not only of wool / but of memory, longing and our connection to each other’. ‘The last journey that I did was particularly powerful,’ the artist reflects. ‘I took the coverings with me and I stayed next to the boulder overnight. There’s something really special about that place at nighttime. The intensity changes: it becomes stiller, but more alive at the same time.’
He is currently working on integrating the textiles from all three journeys into a larger woven piece. He plans to return to the boulder with the piece when it’s completed to host a ceremony and to record sounds from around it, an element which he hopes to develop with guidance from Ever. ‘I think I’d like to stretch out the sound, to highlight the fact that this boulder has been shaped over millions of years, and now I’ve come across it and found it and it’s like, what do I do? What do I do about this incredible thing on this mountain in the middle of the sky? And I think the sound is going to really help.’
Raised in the Peak District, Ava Ord spent a lot of time making outdoors, and the land and its elements have seeped into her work. Initially training in illustration, she became disillusioned with the corporate side of the discipline, eventually finding fine art to be a more accommodating space for critical and introspective work. The Surrealists are huge influences for her, and she often paints by candlelight, incorporating automatic drawing, painting with smoke, and taking rubbings from rocks into her process.
‘I think there is a very strong connection between making artwork and being outside in nature and doing things for no reason,’ Ord says. ‘If more people engaged with these things, then they would have a lot more respect for the land around them. I think it makes you understand materials at a deeper level – when you use something like charcoal, you think about what it actually is and where it’s come from.’
For her degree show, Ord shared a series of charcoal and chalk drawings that were displayed on a soft clay-coloured wall, adorned with subtle hand-painted organic forms. She shares that installing on white walls felt wrong for the work: ‘I felt a strong separation between the work and the space. It felt like the work was drowning. I started painting the wall, originally just a flat grey to add depth, but the texture from this old roller began making marks. I couldn’t help myself; I started doing what I do in my drawings, finding shapes and building layers. My dream place to display the work would be in a cave or a natural environment.’
Her drawings are airy and otherworldly, light-filled explorations of an interdependent ecology that is boundlessly fluid. ‘Spirit Line’ (2025), an abstract ink drawing, whirls watery grey inks and deep blue and white pencil marks together in a blur of stone and water. Lines go through the work like fissures in a rock that have been softened by time, appearing like the scratches left by one rock over another, the soft scrape leaving behind a powdery residue. ‘Intraterrestrial’ (2025), a charcoal and ink piece that she showed in the exhibition Land / Sea / Sky at Fronteer Gallery in Sheffield, seems to pull apart the matter of the world in whirling concentric rings. ‘It’s about intraterrestrial organisms, things that live deep underground through layers of sediment. I was thinking about time and how it builds up, that sedimentary process. There are figures in it that I see as people buried under the earth over centuries. Wherever I go, I’m thinking about the story of the place.’
At the time of writing this article, the artists have yet to commence their residencies at Bloc Projects and are eager to be in the room together, to have access to space to make, play and collaborate. Their excitement shows how critical programmes such as this are, offering the next generation a space to remain in practice and in conversation with others. As Ever puts it, ‘I never really thought a programme like this was possible. I kept going and pursuing art because I loved it, but I didn’t think that there were really many opportunities out there. I think they’re very important because, when you finish uni, it’s like having everything pulled away from underneath you… Organisations like Bloc, they’re artist led, not run by people just trying to make money. It’s run by artists supporting other artists. I don’t think you could really wish for anything more.’
Jessica Piette is a writer and curator.
The Pathways exhibition at Bloc Projects, Sheffield, runs 5-28 March 2026, with an opening event on Thursday 5 March, 6-8pm.
This piece is supported by Bloc Projects.
Published 23.02.2026 by Benjamin Barra in Explorations
2,860 words
